Editorial

It brings me a great pleasure to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Science ( JEFAS), entitled "Innovatión, educatión and knowledge management in Latin America". The five papers published in this issue were carefully selected from a pool of over 200 manuscripts presented at the 51st Annual Assembly of the Latin American Council of Business Schools,on the topic "Innovatión in Business Schools" which took place from October 2-4, 2016 in the city of Medellin, Colombia. They constitute an eclectic but intertwined mix of empirically and theoretically grounded papers paying attentión to innovatión as a driver for improved strategic, organizatiónal and institutiónal performance.

The first paper, "The disconnectión between the fourth helix and innovatión systems: the case of financing mechanisms" (title translated from Spanish), explores the role of the civil society – the fourth helix attached to the state-university-enterprise triple helix proposed by Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2000) – in innovatión systems building through financial contributións, and it analyses the institutiónal barriers that prevent their full engagement in this dynamic relatiónal matrix.

In the second paper, "The influence of knowledge related to innovative performance", the authors evaluate knowledge as a determinant of business innovatión performance, and how this fluid asset is transferred and applied by entrepreneurs leaving multinatiónal firms in their newly established business initiatives. A rich database of 356 entrepreneurs based in Costa Rica is used to validate findings showing a positive and significant correlatión between knowledge and innovatión performance of young firms.

The third paper, "Social power relatiónships of preadolescent childrenon influence in their mothers’ purchasing behavior in Peruvian toy stores: initial study in an emerging market", explores the relatiónship between legitimate and expert social power types of preadolescent childrenon the influence in their mothers’ purchasing behavior. A thorough literature review tackling the concept of social power is followed by four hypotheses regarding familiar purchasing behavior which are tested using a pilot sample size of 67 cases. Findings show important changeson consumptión behavior of mothers in a Latin American context.

Article number four, "Earnings management to report losses or shortages in culling: Chile 2010-2014" (title translated from Spanish), examines earning management performance of nonfinancial Chilean firms using Burgstahler and Dichev’s (1997) methodology. Statistically significant low frequencies of small losses and high frequencies of small benefits are reported during the period under study, results which can be useful to identify suspicious companies managing earnings above their forecasted results, thus companies that may be incurring in fraudulent practices.

Finally, "A bibliometric analysis of venture capital research" reviews progresson venture capital research for the period 1990-2014 by analyzing papers hosted in the Web of Science database. Findings show a steady increase in research output during the period under study as well as 40 academic journals publishing regularlyon the subject. The paper makes an original contributión by laying the foundatións of a more refined research agendaon venture capital studies.

These five papers provide novel insights to the fields of management, economics and applied finance while fulfilling the journal’s missión to provide theoretically rigorous and empirically relevant research aimed at serving the needs of management academics and practitióners worldwide.

Miklos Lukacs de Pereny, PhD

Guest Editor